Incarnate Deity: Reflections on the Movie E.T.

On its 20th anniversary, the movie E.T. has returned to the big screen! Many a proud parent, I imagine, will feel it a necessary obligation to introduce their children to the magical story of an alien stranded on earth and befriended by a boy. I also imagine that most kids, being more accustomed to the high action and computer graphics of movies like X-Men, will likely find E.T. more muppet show than alien drama.

I often wonder why our society has such a fascination with extra-terrestrial life. Maybe we share the same sentiment as Ted in the movie Contact, who thought of the vast universe as “an awful lot of wasted space.” I think our preoccupation started when the Italian astronomer Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli pointed his telescope at Mars in October of 1877 and discovered what he described as canali which, translated as “canals” in English, suggested a man-made or intelligent design. This unleashed a fury of commentary on the possibility of Martian life.

In the absence of a God-centered worldview, enlightened society finally had something to believe in. This was no supernaturalism; this was pure science based on hard fact with logical conclusions. The possibility of extraterrestrial life was something people could really sink their teeth into, and the beauty of it was that it allowed them to entertain the idea of something greater than themselves without embracing the notion of God. I believe that with the discovery of the canals on Mars, a neo ancient Greek paganism was born complete with a pantheon of gods called Martians. The worship of these “gods” takes place through our use of technology to communicate with them in the unspoken (and sometimes spoken) hope that someone or something more advanced and peaceful than us will listen and come and save us. If this seems a bit dramatic, realize that in 2000 Microsoft pledged $12.5 million dollars to develop a telescope using an array of backyard satellite dishes set to come on-line in 2005 that will “listen” to a million stars a year with the sole purpose of finding other civilizations. During the 1990s, 900,000 people in the U.S. alone claimed to have been abducted by aliens. This is no whimsical fancy; this is a serious belief system.

What form will the “gods” take when they do finally visit us? Maybe they will come to destroy, like the aliens in the movie Independence Day, or to offer us platitudes of wisdom about our bent towards violence and misery, as in the movie The Matrix. Maybe, like the Greek gods, they will visit us and walk among us, offering earth’s inhabitants a heavenly glimpse of goodness. After all, doesn’t E.T. (mixing in Christian imagery here in true Greek syncretistic fashion) “die” to save Eliot’s life and then come back to life again? Cute movie and touching drama aside, E.T. is merely a modernization of ancient Greek mythology reflecting man’s hope for salvation from himself.

What does this have to do with bioethics? If we are to envision a truly human future, it must start with the recognition that humanity does not exist by chance or without purpose. Growing sentiment suggests that the universe itself seems to be arrayed and designed in such a way as to sustain human life. Some even suggest that in all of the vast starry expanse we are alone.

We must resist the temptation to think of humanity as an inconsequential blip on the map of the universe. The ancient Greeks believed humanity to be mere playthings of the gods. Christians contend that we are personally known by an eternal God. We are not alone.

We ought to recognize that our view of humanity should be much higher than it is. Like the Apostle Paul in the Parthenon of Athens in ancient Greece, we need to challenge our society’s need to find significance in these “unknown gods” and point them to the person and work of Jesus Christ.